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Perhaps this might seem like a basic question, but why has it taken so long for processors to support AV1, given that it has been out for years?
by BoumTAC 3y ago
Perhaps this might seem like a basic question, but why has it taken so long for processors to support AV1, given that it has been out for years?
- londons_explore 3y agoDesign cycles of hardware is long. The person who benefits from a more efficient codec tends to be netflix/youtube (lower bandwidth costs), and they are far far removed from the chipmaker - market forces get very weak at that distance.
- nickpeterson 3y agoAlso, specialized hardware for a specific format feels like a really good way to have a useless part of a cpu if the format stops being used.
- imtringued 3y agoPeople never stopped using VP8. In fact, your screen sharing is probably wasting excessive amounts of CPU every day because there is no hardware support.
- kccqzy 3y agoYouTube makes their own chips: https://www.protocol.com/amp/youtube-custom-chips-argos-asics-2657907286 https://www.protocol.com/amp/youtube-custom-chips-argos-asic... Netflix doesn't benefit since their catalog is orders of magnitude smaller.
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoAV1 isn't particularly behind schedule compared with previous codec generstions. We could and should have moved faster if everything went well but Qualcomm in particular were being awkward about IP issues. Luckily the effort behind the David software codecs kept up the rollout momentum.
- baybal2 3y ago[dead]
- cubefox 3y agoThe AV1 ASIC takes up space on the SoC, so effectively it decreases the performance of other parts. This could be why some manufacturers have delayed including support for quite a while. Though Mediatek already had AV1 support three years ago.
- fomine3 3y agoTwo big SoC manufacturers, Apple and Qualcomm, have patents for competitors like HEVC
- llm_nerd 3y agoApple has a tiny sliver of the patents in HEVC, and while we don't have the numbers I feel pretty certain they pay far more into the pool to ship HEVC in their devices than they get out of it. The same is doubly true of Qualcomm who aren't even a part of the pool. HEVC was finalized in 2013. AV1 was finalized in 2018, and has just finally started getting a robust ecosystem of software and hardware.
- fomine3 3y agoIn context of format war, winning means that they earn patent fee from every device. I don't think it's Apple's intension, but possibly Qualcomm's.
- llm_nerd 3y agoQualcomm isn't even a part of the HEVC alliance patent pool, so that theory doesn't hold. Indeed, the fact that Qualcomm is currently building AV1 support into their next chip (purportedly) puts them at risk of being sued because while AV1 is open, we all know how patents work and there are almost certainly actionable overlaps with the pool. Apple ships probably more devices than anyone, and given that the patent pool is huge as mentioned odds are overwhelmingly that it costs them money to support HEVC / HEIC, not the reverse. That theory also is dubious. Remember when everyone was yammering for VP8 support? Then it was VP9 support? Now it's AV1. Sometimes it takes a while to shake out. By all appearances AV1 is a winner, hence why it's finally getting support.
- Rastonbury 3y agoIf I'm not wrong paying to patent pool is capped, so apple would just pay at the cap
- 3y ago
- repelsteeltje 3y agoKeep in mind that standards are moving slow, CODEC standards more so. The golden standard is still h264/AVC, which dates back to the nineties. This is primarily due to many appliances (set top boxes, cameras, phones, TVs) using the absolute cheapest hardware stack they can get their hands on.
- pipo234 3y ago+1 Indeed. Compared to other standards in streaming media, I'd say that AOMedia has found adoption a lot quicker. h265 (HEVC) was all but DoA until years after it's introduction Apple finally decided to embrace it. It is still by no means ubiquitous, mostly due to patent licensing, which significantly drives up the price of hardware in single digit dollars price range. Anecdotally, consider that Apple's HTTP Live Streaming protocol (till version 6) relied on MPEG2TS, even though Apple lay the groundwork for ISO/IEC 14496-12 Base Media File Format aka MP4. The reason was that chips in the initial Iphones had only support for h264 using mpeg2 transport streams, and even mp4 -> mp2 transmuxing was considered too resource intensive.
- londons_explore 3y ago> even mp4 -> mp2 transmuxing was considered too resource intensive. Really? Muxing generally doesn't require one to decode the actual data - merely shuffle around blocks of data with memcpy() so should be really cheap.
- repelsteeltje 3y agomemcpy is ±99%. The 1% involves bit shifting (nal unit reshuffling, avc3/avc1 fixups). So indeed, repackaging mp4 <-> mp2 containers is pretty trivial. Nevertheless, Apple initially choose mpeg2TS because it conveniently allowed them to shove the reassembled media segments straight into the dedicated AV chip.
- dylan604 3y ago>Anecdotally, consider that Apple's HTTP Live Streaming protocol (till version 6) relied on MPEG2TS This sounds like you might be confusing that MPEG2TS might have something to do with the video encoding instead of it solely being the way the video/audio elementary streams are wrapped together into a single contained format. The transport stream was designed specifically for an unreliable streaming type of delivery vs a steady consistent type of source like reading from a dis[c|k]. There is nothing wrong with using a TS stream for HLS that makes it inferior.
- dist-epoch 3y agoChicken & egg problem. No AV1 videos -> no pressure to add hardware support -> difficult to justify encoding videos in AV1
- bee_rider 3y agoI thought Google was the main one behind AV1. Couldn’t they use their position as one of the world’s biggest video platforms to break that chicken egg loop?
- alex_duf 3y agoThe article mentions Android 14 requiring AV1 hardware support, so yes.
- lxgr 3y agoYouTube has been supporting AV1 for a while now.
- entropicdrifter 3y agoThey have been. YouTube was the first big platform to push for AV1
- troupo 3y agoThey have. They literally threatened to pull their support from devices if they don't implement the codec in hardware. Roku's spat with Google was a big-ish story when that happened. I don't know how that can be viewed as a good thing.
- FullyFunctional 3y agoNetflix (and Youtube? I forget) will push an AV1 stream if you have the support. This was even mentioned in Apple's show yesterday. So the egg is already there and the chicken is slowly coming, thankfully.
- entropicdrifter 3y agoYouTube was the first to support it. They even went to war with Roku over it and Roku killed the YouTube TV app in retaliation to YouTube's mandate that all next-gen devices support AV1, so YouTube went ahead and embedded it inside the regular YouTube app. Roku's latest devices to support AV1, so I guess either the price came down, they struck a deal, or Roku just lost to the market pressure after Netflix pushed for AV1 as well.
- galad87 3y agoExisting codecs are good enough in most cases.
- ksec 3y agoEspecially when Google and AOM promise to have a hardware encoder and decoder to be given out for free by 2018, and be implemented in many SoC by 2019, wide availability support and AV2 by 2020. Well the basic answer is that, making an efficient hardware encoder and decoder, within power budget and die space, all while conforming to standard because you wont have much of a chance to correct it, and implementing it into the SoC design cycle which is and always has been at least three years minimum, is a lot harder than most software engineer at Google and AOM would thought.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoIts Apple and Qualcomm that have been slow. Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and other ARM chipmakers for phones, TVs, streaming sticks and such were quicker to pick it up.
- AzzyHN 3y agoSame reason why you'd write code with Java 8 or C89